Using your Google Brain
Over the last year I've been using a new party discussion gambit which consists of positing that "Google makes me smarter." The resulting discussion quickly separates the digiterati from the illinternet sheep.
Why? Because it is true! Using Google as an outboard memory system for our brains results in a net increase of our apparent intelligence. In fact this is so demonstrably true that even the old media is starting to notice. Although, predictably, they warn of the dangers rather than exploring the positive; reminding me of similar articles from the 1970's describing how kids were starting to use calculators in school, all of which invariably ended in dire predictions of impending innumeracy. (Ignoring the fact that you have to understand math conceptually in order to use a calculator in the first place. Which should be your first clue that the writers of such articles are probably innumerate themselves, if they think math consists of memorizing the multiplication tables.)
The same applies to your 'Google Brain'; you must understand a little about the subject you are searching for specific information on, and a lot about the Internet in general (including the fact that not everything you find is going to be correct), in order to construct a good search request and get the most from a search result.
Moreover, let me extend the phrase 'Google Brain' to include all Internet searches, all use of resource sites (like Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project), and all tag-based emergent discovery systems (like del.icio.us and Technorati Tags). In all of these cases your 'Google Brain' must separate a few kernels of wheat from an immensely larger mass of useless chaff, with the searches and resource sites only doing the first winnowing step for you. Afterwards you must still apply your own judgment, knowledge, and experience to select which web sites will get some of your precious attention. And you will resent expending attention on a web page that turns out to be useless, to the point that you will remember that site again if another page from it turns up in a future search, and not bother with it.
So your Google Brain isn't the Internet itself - it is your ability to construct search terms and to decide which results are most likely to be relevant. Your ability to compare competing results and to decide which has the most authority. Your ability to pick out the wheat once the chaff has been reduced enough that the wheat is visible.
Your Google Brain is the way you use the mind tool that the Internet is. Just like calculators made some of us better at math than we might otherwise have been by allowing us to use outboard 'math processors' within the structure of our conceptual understanding of math, so does the Google Brain make us better at knowing things (insignificant or profound) when we need to know them by using an outboard 'knowledge processor'.
Twenty years from now pretty much everyone will have a Google Brain, to a greater or lesser extent, and the news media will be griping about how there are inherent dangers in neural interfaces.
Why? Because it is true! Using Google as an outboard memory system for our brains results in a net increase of our apparent intelligence. In fact this is so demonstrably true that even the old media is starting to notice. Although, predictably, they warn of the dangers rather than exploring the positive; reminding me of similar articles from the 1970's describing how kids were starting to use calculators in school, all of which invariably ended in dire predictions of impending innumeracy. (Ignoring the fact that you have to understand math conceptually in order to use a calculator in the first place. Which should be your first clue that the writers of such articles are probably innumerate themselves, if they think math consists of memorizing the multiplication tables.)
The same applies to your 'Google Brain'; you must understand a little about the subject you are searching for specific information on, and a lot about the Internet in general (including the fact that not everything you find is going to be correct), in order to construct a good search request and get the most from a search result.
Moreover, let me extend the phrase 'Google Brain' to include all Internet searches, all use of resource sites (like Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project), and all tag-based emergent discovery systems (like del.icio.us and Technorati Tags). In all of these cases your 'Google Brain' must separate a few kernels of wheat from an immensely larger mass of useless chaff, with the searches and resource sites only doing the first winnowing step for you. Afterwards you must still apply your own judgment, knowledge, and experience to select which web sites will get some of your precious attention. And you will resent expending attention on a web page that turns out to be useless, to the point that you will remember that site again if another page from it turns up in a future search, and not bother with it.
So your Google Brain isn't the Internet itself - it is your ability to construct search terms and to decide which results are most likely to be relevant. Your ability to compare competing results and to decide which has the most authority. Your ability to pick out the wheat once the chaff has been reduced enough that the wheat is visible.
Your Google Brain is the way you use the mind tool that the Internet is. Just like calculators made some of us better at math than we might otherwise have been by allowing us to use outboard 'math processors' within the structure of our conceptual understanding of math, so does the Google Brain make us better at knowing things (insignificant or profound) when we need to know them by using an outboard 'knowledge processor'.
Twenty years from now pretty much everyone will have a Google Brain, to a greater or lesser extent, and the news media will be griping about how there are inherent dangers in neural interfaces.